One.
When you remember what happened to you as a child,
Ignore it.
It probably doesn't mean much anyway
After all,
You're probably just using it as an excuse to get away with ******
You're probably just making it up for attention.

Two.
When a boy fondles you in your church boiler room,
Do not tell anyone.
Since you froze up
Did not say no
The best case scenario
Is that they will make you "talk it out"
And tell you it is your Christian duty to forgive him
The worst case scenario
Is that your formerly mutual friends will brand a scarlet letter to your chest
And you make it your personal mission to live up to that label.

Three.
If you have *** before marriage,
Do not let anyone find out.
If you have *** with multiple people before marriage,
Hide it under lock and key.
If you have casual *** with multiple people before marriage,
You can forget about going to heaven.

Four.
When you have become the perfect liar and *****,
Do not get assaulted.
You know what I said about no one believing you?
Increase that times one hundred thousand.
The only difference is this time
Not even the ones you love the most
Will take you seriously.
You'll get your morning dosage
Of ****-shaming
And "what were you wearing?"
The nightly pill shoved down your throat
"He was in a bad place."

Five.
When he texts you four months later
Saying he hasn't tried to **** himself in quite a while
When you read the word "sorry" in a public bathroom
Say you're okay.
Do not say you are bulimic
And that where his hands went that night
Or the text messages that made you fear for your safety
Had anything to do with your own perfectly calculated mental breakdown.

Six.
When your church talks about purity,
Nod like the rest of the robots.
Smile, because you are their concrete example
Of who not to become.
Why do they care more about the *** you have
Than the *** that was forced upon you?
They say trauma has a stronger link to addiction
Than obesity does to diabetes
Do they ever stop to wonder
If just maybe, I am addicted to everything I hate?
They will tell me I have nothing new to add to the discussion
So they can silence me
But I have my story
A story that is mine and I control
The ending.

To grow up fat is to go without
I do not gorge myself on compliments
But rather savor the taste of hearing my mother say
How only stick-thin people can wear bikinis
As if fat people have needles instead of skin
That stab those who stare at our bareness
As if it wasn't a reflection of her own self-image.

To grow up fat is to go without
I give my body
I leave no trace
When I was sexually assaulted by a date,
No one believed me.
Tell me I should be happy to have someone who wants me
Tell me I love the attention
Because when I stare into the water at my reflection
And see his hands covering my face
Still love the attention.

To grow up fat is to go without
The word ugly becomes my name
It is repeated so frequently that I forget my own
"Sarah"
I speak, and somehow it shocks them
A scapegoat like me can breathe intelligence
Can be brilliant, ambitious

To grow up fat is to go without
We, we are told we must venture to the land of milk and honey
As our words become bland
And our souls become sweet
Both liquidized into a seamless mold where we look thin
We go with our bodies wide open
As others feast on our flesh
****** and raw
All give, no take
Yet we continue to hear about our laziness.

To grow up fat is to go without
Because I binge on self-confidence
I get called a ***** and a ****
When I am starving, I am weak
But when I am not weak, I am arrogant
When I am not weak, I am nothing
The world fosters my dependence
For when I learn I no longer need to hide my body
I sabotage the machine.

To grow up fat is to go without
The expectation of being worthy
To grow up fat is to learn
How to find your worth alone.

I live my life in extremes
Polar opposites attract in the center of my soul
And for some reason, living on opposite ends
Seems to be a fashion trend
I am not the "I made out with every girl in my college sorority
So now I'm bisexual" type of queer
Not to out-and-proud vomiting rainbows type of bisexuality
I am the bisexuality that gets erased
The eighth grade girl who, when she told her first boyfriend she was queer,
He told her she was over dramatic and crazy.
I am the bisexuality that gets oppressed
Because I am confined to the walls of a shrinking closet
Or is it expanding?
I have lost my sense of left or right
Up or down
Yes or no.
I am not your manic pixie dream girl type of bipolar
Not the girl who needs saving from her mental illness
Not drowning.
I am the bipolar disorder that becomes overwhelming
The depression that chains me to my bed in the morning
The hypomania that seems euphoric, but is never happy
The grey area, the lone horizon, the empty space in the middle
Seems like something I drive through over the speed limit
Every day of my life.
While my extremes do not look good on your favorite actress
They look beautiful on me.
Not an outfit I can strip down when it goes out of style
Not a channel I can change when it is not appealing anymore
But I will learn to love my fluctuations
My mood pendulum
My love pendulum
I am swinging from state to state
But at least I am flying
Instead of falling.

When you are young
They tell you to guard your heart
Fear the boy who will put it through the shredder
Stomp on it
Spit in it
But they do not tell you to fear
The man who thinks no means go harder
Move faster
Scream louder
It seems like your fear is supposed to stop at fifteen
Until you learn that guarding your heart means guarding your body
Until you learn not to walk alone at night
Even though there is a better chance you will be ***** by a friend
Than a stranger
This is not a "protect yourself because you are weak" poem
Since when has protecting yourself worked anyway?
No, you are strong
Our bodies are turn into fists that punch through the drywall
As he throws you around, you curl up into yourself
This is not a "protect ourselves because we are weak" poem
Since when has protecting ourselves worked anyway?
No, we are strong
I become the body hovering above your ghost
As he stops briefly but continues to shove himself inside of me
This is not an "all men are evil" poem
Since when was this conversation about that anyway?
No, you are good
You are the phone call at four AM
You are the "can I do anything to help you?"
You are the "it isn't your fault"
My heart did not break because of emotional teenage angst
It broke because a man knew he could snap my body in half
It broke because she was told she was not credible
It broke because there will always be a man
Who holds my power in the very thread of his being
And he knows the consequences will be minimal.
When you are young,
They will tell you to guard your heart
Instead,
Rip yourself open
Fight the system which allows this to happen
Go before the judge and let yourself reveal the most intimate parts of this misogynistic
This oppressive
This **** culture
Fully exposed.

The first time I knew I was fat I was five
When you told me not to eat the other half of my food
Because it would make me bigger
As if I was large to begin with
A perfectly normal, healthy, happy child
Saw the light flicker in her eyes
And eventually, burn out.
From then on, you kept attempting to be my nutritionist
Where you had no place to do so.
I kept learning to restrain myself
To eat when I was hungry
But when I was hungry, I was told not to eat
I kept wandering around within myself
A stray dog, a lost thought
The candle in my mind never stayed long
Somehow, you thought shaming me would help my hips to stop protruding into the atmosphere
Would help me shrink wrap my body
To become dust, like everyone else in our thin town
Thin high school
Thin media.
When I fell in love with those hips, those thighs, that stomach
I was told to become a ghost again
Even in the wake of my eating disorder.
What no one tells you about shame
Is that the end goal is never attainable
It's like helping someone breathe
By suffocating them
It's like teaching someone to swim
By drowning them
You told me it was never about appearance
I believed you
Until you made a comment about self-mutilation after I got an ear piercing
Knowing I used to cut myself.
Making me think of all that was said and done
Since I was five years old
When you bought me gifts if I lost a certain amount of weight
When you insulted my hair, my clothes, my makeup
I learned that my body
Was nothing but a canvas
That I was supposed to erase the picture if you didn't like it
And that I was nothing by my body.
I now have a plan to get healthy
But I don't intend on telling you what it is
Because it has nothing to do with weight loss
And you will simply undermine it
As you undermine me
Every time you tell me I will fail.
You told me you did not want me to be like you
Since you let yourself go
So I keep sinking
But at least at the bottom of the ocean, dad
I can drown out the chance
That I will ever be like you.

When the girls at my Christian college find out I am pansexual
They ask me
What Biblical evidence I have to back up the righteousness
Of same-*** relationships
Like it is a fact out of a textbook
That my love for people is wrong
Same old hymn, sing it again
You're sick of getting rejected
Same old hymn, sing it again
I love you but I don't support your lifestyle
Same old hymn, sing it again
Don't date her, she'll cheat on you anyway
We keep harmonizing to the chorus:
Love the sinner, hate the sin
Love the sinner, hate the sin
Hate who you are, love who you should be
When they tell me pansexual people only exist because it is trendy
That my love for a woman is a fallacy
I love who I love when it goes out of style
Why are we only focused on LGBTQ
When there is love that protrudes beyond those limiting letters?
Never have I seen one pan person on a panel
Speaking about their story
Speaking about their pain
As if they are the only version of this record
Somewhere, another queer person loses a job
Holds a silver bullet to the temple
Scratch that
Society, our construct of queer, the Church
Places the weapon at the scene of the crime
This is no longer a suicide
As we can suspect fowl play.
Every time this happens
My knees become knobs on a radio
My brain, a button
My body switches channels
Begging, pleading, screaming to sing
A different melody.

When I was eight I used to ask my mom
Why daddy was so mean to me
She would tell me to talk to him about it.
I remember throwing up
Like the bones of my guilt were piercing my throat
Like I had taken one too many cookies from the forbidden jar
Like I was doing something I wasn't supposed to
Something bad.
The one time I did talk to him
I pulled the strings of my heart's corset loose
And let him see the emptiness left there
He yelled at me again, making me cry.
I always ask myself if I would rather have divorced parents
Or a parent who guts me like a dead fish daily
Even after many apologies
I lay naked and bruised
Upon the lies I tell myself to stay sane.
I tell myself he doesn't know the impact of his words
Swift blow to the belly
Swift blow to the mind.
I tell myself he will get better when I come home from school
Until he finds out I am sharing skin to a girl
Until he finds out where my skin has been.
I tell myself none of it matters
But I feel guilty when he brings up my weight
But I feel guilty when I take my medication behind his back.
I feel like a shadow of his sins
And a ghost of his future
Lurking in the shadows
As he tells me the same things everyday
And I wilt silently in his suffocating grasp
Forever lonely,
Forever alone.
When I was eighteen, my dad told me he was sorry
For all the years he hung my by the noose of comments about my appearance.
I thought he meant it and I forgave him
I should have known better than to trust the butcher.